Things to Remember Before You Start – Part 3

TRANSCRIPT:
Avish: Alright Fred, the next thing I want to talk about is kind of interesting since we just talked about ethics and legalities. But a piece of advice you give people is to Sell Your Customers Crack.

Fred: Yeah. The idea here is that, you know, I own a site called crackdealermarketing.com. Nothing is there right now, but I love the name because if you can find something, and I’ll be quite honest with you, the crack that I sell my customers, one of the crack items I sell them is Web Marketing Magic. And by selling your customers crack, I mean, try and find something great that you can sell to your customers that they will love so much, that they can never, ever do without, and will pay you for it forever.

So, if you can find something that is an indispensable product or program that you can sell to your customers, that they can never again be without, you have a gold mine. So that every month, I receive a fairly sizeable check from the people behind Web Marketing Magic, webmarketingmagic.com, for a piece of software that is absolutely essential for anybody to run an information marketing business, including anyone listening to this program. So again, Sell Your Customers Crack means find what it is that your customers really want, give it to them and give it to them in a form that they can never, ever stop using it.

Avish: And I think you even take it one step farther, right? Because you make, you like the image of the crack dealer giving away the samples, right? I mean, you do that with a lot of your stuff now.

Fred: Yeah. So, if you’ve got something really, really valuable that people will get hooked on, you know, why not give them, similar to a drug dealer, a sample to get them hooked on it? So, yeah, you might be giving something away for free, or in the case of Web Marketing Magic, giving somebody a 30 day trial for, like, you know, under 5 bucks. And it becomes so enticing that the person has to take a nibble of the fruit, and once they’ve nibbled on the fruit they are, you know, people who crave that fruit forever.

Avish: And so, just for people who might be turned off by the crack dealer metaphor, the samples and the offers you’re giving them are things that are going to legitimately help them out and help their business, correct?

Fred: Yeah. This is, obviously, I’m using the drug example in a fun and jocular way. But what we’re doing is, we’re providing people with great products and, or information or tools, that they will find indispensible. And once we give them something or let them try something at a really reduced price, we’re going to get them hooked.

Avish: Got it. Well, the next up is, what about the 10 Times Rule? What is that?

Fred: Well, the 10 Times Rule is something that I put together, I, many, many years ago because I felt myself, you could never lose on creating an information product if you deliver something to someone where you could help, you could make them feel as if they got 10 times the value that they paid. So let’s say that you put together a $100 product. If you can make people feel, once they buy, consume, use, and work with that product, that they’ve gotten over 100, $1000 in value, I’m sorry, that they will have been delighted. So now, you’ve got somebody who buys a $100 product from you.

They take it, they use it, they make all kinds of money, or it benefits them in all kinds of great ways, and they feel, man, I would have paid $1000 for this. That’s the whole thing about the 10 Times Rule, because if you do that, the net result will be that people will buy a whole lot more from you in future, you know, in future offers, and they will tell all their friends and you’ll probably get great testimonials as well. So, everybody who is listening to this, make sure that every time you produce a product, if you can’t say to yourself, okay if my price point is $777, if this program isn’t, you know, if my program’s $77, if this program is not worth at least 800 bucks or thereabouts, I should go back and redo it.

Avish: Okay. Well that kind of leads nicely into our next idea, which is more around the pricing side of it, which is the value equation and pricing your products.

Fred: Yeah. Often times, people price their products based on, you know, how long they are, whatever they are. The value equation basically says this, if I sell you this product, whatever this product is, the pricing for that product should be based on how much value did you get from it. So, if I were to sell you, for example, and I think that the best example of this is, you know, think about for, Avish, for a second, you know, the secret formula for Coke.

Avish: Mm hmm.

Fred: Now the secret formula for Coke, I will presume, can be written, you know, on the back of a large napkin. Would you probably agree with that?

Avish: Yeah, I would think so.

Fred: Okay. So maybe there, let’s say there are, oh I don’t know, as many as 50 items, which is probably over the top, but let’s say there are 50 items that go the formula for Coke. So now if I were to write the secret formula for Coke on the back of a napkin and hand it to you, you know, what’s the value of the napkin and the ink I just handed you? It’s a couple of cents, a couple of pennies. But the value of the secret formula for Coke is worth billions of dollars. So again, that’s an extreme example to show you that the amount of money it takes to produce something is not the formula by which you come up with pricing for a product. It’s based on what the value would be derived by the person using the product. Does that make sense?

Avish: Yeah, absolutely. And that’s, I don’t know if you ever experienced, but that can be one of the hardest things, right, for people to wrap their minds around?

Fred: It is, because I think that so many people are, you know, they’re, they think about information products, and they go, you know, well, all this is, is a CD or three CDs. How can I charge, you know, $400 for this when the cost when the cost of my CD was, like, 83 cents apiece? Well, the reason why is because you’re not selling a CD. You’re selling the knowledge that you’re giving people in the CD or in the audio program or in the, whatever program that you’re producing, and how much value they will derive from it. So, yeah, for some people it, you know, they need to get their sort of their head around that.

Avish: Alright. Let’s talk about this idea of doing it your own way, and this kind of builds off of what we’ve talked about before, about other internet marketing people or, you know, other people in your industry. And, you know, you said that for a while you would speak at their events, but then you decided to do it your own way?

Fred: Yeah. I mean, a lot of, you know, there are a lot of people doing a lot of things that, frankly, you or I may not feel comfortable with. And so I think that you have to discover sort of your own path when doing information marketing. One in which you feel, you know, you’re making money, you’re feeling comfortable, you’re not taking advantage of people, and I think that they’re, you know, you do have to figure out how to do it yourself.

So, for example, one of the things that I’ve told you about and I’ve told all the members of our JV partner group about, is how I literally stopped subscribing to everybody’s list. I’m putting my head down and doing my own work and not really caring. I mean, I want to hear about new ideas, but new kinds of bogus, you know, get rich quick schemes that so-and-so is doing, or did you hear that, you know, so-and-so made like $1.5 million from some (inaudible 00:07:03 #6)–

I don’t care. I’m just keeping my head down and building a real solid business. I’m not listening to all that noise out there. So doing it your own way is all about making sure that you take a system, like what I’m giving people here, that you put your nose to the grindstone and you make it happen, and you just understand that it’s going to take some time. So that’s what I mean by sort of doing it your own way.

Avish: Okay. Just to make sure there’s no confusion, I do want to ask how does that, you know, here you are suggesting people do it their own way. You know, before, though, we talked about how if someone’s going to do this program, that if they have different ideas of how to do things, you suggested they don’t do it. You know, they stick to this model first. So, just to make sure there’s no confusion as to, you know, what you’re talking about in those two situations?

Fred: Yeah, that’s a good point. I mean, doing it your own way really is coming to your own conclusions about how to run your own business. But that assumes that you’re already up and running in your business and you know the basics. So I think that the confusion can be cleared up by the fact that, when you first start out in information marketing you know nothing about the business, so follow my model and follow it pretty precisely until you get it up and running. After that, you may decide that you want to create, you know, and you have a different way of looking at.

For example, with me right now, I used to produce a lot of my own products and sell them myself. My model now has changed. I’m doing it a different way, my own way, which is doing a lot of partnering with other people to help them create their materials and their, you know, and their info products and partnering with them. So my model itself, I mean doing it your own way is really understanding how to do it to first get started, but then after that you may create a model for yourself that works. And who knows? Two years, 3 years down the road, completely change that model, you know, based on your own ideas and experiences. The do it your own way is really about listening to your own, you know, your own heart, your own feelings, your own ideas, and listening to that, but do that after you’ve developed a basic understanding of the process.

Avish: Okay, that clears that up. Makes sense. What about difficult people and customers? Do you ever encounter any of those?

Fred: Yeah, and my suggestion is that if, unless you, you know, most of the time people put up with difficult customers because they need the money and they have to have the money. I would suggest that as soon as you’re in a position, and in most cases I would suggest that people start out doing information part-time, if they’re making a full-time living somewhere else, not just quitting their job. But the best thing that you can have in a business is the ability to say no or to fire customers. Because people will just, you know, people will suck the lifeblood out of you, if you let them. And there’s certain people who are just so nasty, so mean, so impossible to deal with, that you just don’t want to have them in your group, or involved in anything that you do, so that, you know, I like the idea of not, you know, not having to put up with nonsense from customers, you know, that are really nasty or mean. And I mean we’ve all seen those people, and we should avoid them.

"Some of the links here may be affiliate links. In cases like that I get paid an affiliate commission. I will never lie to you about things like that, but YOUR price if you decide to buy will not be affected. I am also VERY careful not to make ANY exaggerated income claims. Some people make money using my products and materials but the vast majority do NOT. This saddens me, but it's the truth. I only hope that YOU will be one of the few who makes money."

UNSOLICITED TESTIMONIAL: Fred, Your truthfulness amazes me. You do not exaggerate about income claims, and time it takes to be successful, etc. You are truly a breath of fresh air in this business. I have been swindled and conned many times before. - Michael Blythe